Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918

Robert Nemes

Publication Year: 2014

This innovative collection of essays on the upsurge of antisemitism across Europe in the decades around 1900 shifts the focus away from intellectuals and well-known incidents to less-familiar events, actors, and locations, including smaller towns and villages. This “from below” perspective offers a new look at a much-studied phenomenon: essays link provincial violence and antisemitic politics with regional, state, and even transnational trends. Featuring a diverse array of geographies that include Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Romania, Italy, Greece, and the Russian Empire, the book demonstrates the complex interplay of many factors—economic, religious, political, and personal—that led people to attack their Jewish neighbors.

Cover

Title Page, Series Page, Copyright Page

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

...social sciences. The editors and contributors benefited from the opportunity to
participate in and organize panels related to this volume at conferences hosted
by the Association for the Study of Nationalities, the American Historical Association,
and the Association for Jewish Studies. We also want to thank Werner
Bergmann, Ulrich Wyrwa...

Introduction

...two people came together, he was the third.” The people follow the events in
France through a certain Zeidel, the shtetl’s lone newspaper subscriber. As the
author wryly observes, the population learns “through him” rather than “from
him”: they actively reinterpret...

...challenged the notion that a sharp break existed between the
anti-Jewish
attitudes expressed by the churches and Hitler’s racial antisemitism.
Indeed, they have argued, without the support of most practicing Christians,
Nazism never would have garnered...

3 | “L’Osservatore Cattolico” and Davide Albertario | Ulrich Wyrwa

...in 1910, the Jewish historian Martin Philippson focused on the origin
and development of antisemitism in Europe. Philippson, an attentive observer,
pointed out that in a speech from the early 1870s, Pope Pius IX had attacked
Jewish journalists and suggested that Jews...

Part 2: Local Violence and "Ethnic" Politics

4 | The Brusturoasa Uprising in Romania | Iulia Onac

...manifested itself in modern Romania. Within Romania, synthetic works
on Jewish history by Carol Iancu and Victor Neuman have examined aspects
of this violence. The history of antisemitism in Romania also has attracted the
attention of scholars working outside the country...

5 | From Boycott to Riot | Michal Frankl

...that violent anti-Jewish
crowds should not be understood as
“primitive” mobs guided solely by traditional prejudice or lust for plunder and
enrichment. Violence against Jews needs to be analyzed in terms of its causes,
symbolism, and structure. “Revisionist”...

Part 4: Revolution and War

10 | "Horrible Were the Avengers, but the Jews Were Horrible, Too" | Klaus Richter

...violence exerted by the peasants. My approach thus employs
the method of “thick description,” which has proven to be particularly
fruitful in research on pogroms. Another focus here is on the place of action.
The small town (the Yiddish shtetl, Russian...

11 | Duty and Ambivalence | Gerald D. Surh

...form an emergency governing authority. Although troops
did not arrive until the next day, they immediately took the situation in hand,
denied would-be
peasant looters access to the city, and decisively ended the
pogrom. All told, the pogrom lasted only six...

12 | Refugees and Antisemitism in Hungary during the First World War | Robert Nemes

...councilor nevertheless demanded that the police immediately
evict the nine families and urged the city to request that the Ministry of
the Interior revoke the permits it had granted to the ten families. “I consider it
necessary,” he said, “not just to remove...

...last years of the First World War: the essays before us
open up manifestations of hostility, conflict, and violence that are both numerous
and varied. While their chronological scope is confined to the last decades
of the nineteenth century and the first decades...

Notes

About the Contributors

...Jewish Studies and History of Antisemitism at the Jewish Museum
in Prague. His research interests include modern antisemitism, refugee policy, and the
Holocaust. He is the coeditor two volumes of the Theresienstädter Gedenkbücher, the
author of “Prag ist nunmehr antisemitisch”: Tschechischer...

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